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Panel Discussion Explores the Impact of ChatGPT on Higher Education

On 21 February 2023, ACAO hosted a panel discussion on Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer (ChatGPT) and its potential uses (or abuses) in higher education. The goal of the panel was twofold: (1) to introduce provosts and other attendees to ChatGPT (developed by OpenAI) and similar AI language models and technologies; and (2) to discuss the opportunities and challenges of this new technology on our working, teaching, and learning environments.

Three speakers addressed attendees. First, Dr. Jing Peng from Montclair State University provided a high-level presentation on AI chatbot technology and its evolution over time. Dr. Peng’s presentation highlighted the fact that this technology is not “new,” per se, with roots that extend back decades – but its development is accelerating exponentially as it becomes “smarter” given the vast amount of data that are now available for its refinement and evolution.

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The Faculty-CAO Relationship: Making it Work

Regardless of how long you served as an instructional faculty member, as the institution’s Chief Academic Officer, you are no longer part of that club. You still work with and among faculty but make no mistake: You don’t have the same relationships that you previously did. You may have served as a department head or dean and think you are used to changing interactions with faculty, but the CAO role holds a specific set of foibles.

This doesn’t mean you can’t have a collegial association with your faculty; that mutual respect and commitment is more important than ever. But your interactions, communications and overall association is different and more delicate. Keep these three things in mind as you consider your own connections with faculty.

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Internal Leadership Training for Faculty and Academic Administrators Reaps Big Rewards

It is both expensive and time-consuming on many levels to launch a national search for every academic leadership position on campus.  Sometimes, of course, a national search is warranted for a Dean or for a Provost, but for other positions, such as department chairs, program directors, assistant and associate deans and associate/provosts, having a trained and ready “back bench” may be the best solution to maintain desired progress and efficiencies.  Admittedly, there are reasons to desire external candidates when changes and fresh perspectives are desired, but that is not always the case.  More often than not, leadership laments that there are no internal candidates ready to move up.

When colleges and universities want to retain their best, most creative, ambitious, and competent faculty and academic administrators, it is important for these people to sense a career path if they stay at the institution, and it is important to invest in their professional development so that they feel valued. With these two complementary goals in mind, the Touro College Academy of Leadership and Management (TCALM) was implemented five years ago in 2018.

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Practical Alternatives to Tenure: Lessons Learned for Best Practice

As chief academic officers, we are all familiar with the real and perceived concerns about traditional tenure-track faculty appointments. At many of our institutions, these concerns are enhanced by constraints in funding and tenure quotas that limit our ability to make tenure-track appointments. Statistics show the percentage of tenured and tenure-track appointments has declined across all sectors of higher education in recent years. In fact, the American Association of University Professors reports that the actual number of full-time, non-tenure-track faculty hired in 2016 exceeded the number of tenure-track faculty.

While not advocating for or against this practice, we recognize that provosts may need to make non-tenure-track (NTT) appointments to address enrollment trends and to recruit specialized faculty, particularly in new degree programs. Making such appointments may be critical to your success in ensuring the academic quality of your programs.

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Transition to the New Academic Normal

It is now over two years since the COVID-19 pandemic first significantly affected the functions of higher education and the consequences of the impact cannot be under-estimated.  Many effects were budgetary, including negative enrollment growth, but probably most important to academic affairs in the long run was the changes implemented in the way we do our business as faculty and academic administration.  The pandemic resulted in rapid change, but as several authors have noted, primarily the pandemic was speeding up changes in education that were already in progress[1].  In 2020 we went from traditional “university speed” to Star Wars hyper-drive speed, but along the path we had already chosen.
 

The challenges we currently face getting back to a “normal” (thanks to vaccines and other immunity enhancers), are working with student impacts (including the challenges of new students whose instruction while in high school or community college was negatively impacted) and finding the technology mix that is appropriate.  We seem to be in a continuous transition state.  While in 2020, we were mainly responding without much time for reflection, we now need to perform assessments of the changes we made.  We need to assure that modifications that were improvements are not.  It is only through this assessment that our picture of the academy of the future will be realized.

Therefore, we will need to look at changes that were made in:

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Factors CAOs Consider to Remain in Their Positions

In June 2022, ACAO partnered with the American Conference of Academic Deans (ACAD), the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU), and the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU) to study the longevity of Provosts in their positions. The resulting study led to a research paper.

Factors Chief Academic Officers Consider in Deciding Whether to Remain in Their Positions

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